Disclaimer

When working on enterprise level, multi-tiered .Net applications it is not uncommon to want to create a shared class library, that may be used in multiple related projects. For example, let's suppose you are building a public website, a separate private intranet website used by company staff to manage the public site, and one or more console applications that may run as scheduled tasks related to both sites. You may have an console application that creates and emails reports about sales and other data, and another app that encodes video or audio that is uploaded to your site. Finally, you probably have another project for unit tests.

Since all of these projects will be working with the same database you also have a class library in your solution acting as your datalayer, and perhaps another Core library that contains other shared components. Each of these projects has it's own web.config or app.config file, and you had to copy and paste your connection string, smtp server data, and various other appSettings required by all the projects into every .config file. You may be inspired to add a new .config file to your Core library, and store all of the shared appsettings and connection strings in that one central location. If you then delete all of these settings from the other .config files you'll quickly realize that everything breaks. Even setting the "Copy to Output Directory" property of your Core.config file to "Copy always" doesn't fix this. The reason for this of course is that .Net always looks to the host application for the settings.

The solution is to add some code to your Core project that explicitly loads the Core.config file, reads in the data and makes the results available to all the other projects. That code might look something like this:

namespace Williablog.Core.Configuration

{

using System;

using System.Collections.Specialized;

using System.Configuration;

using System.IO;

publicclassBasicSettingsManager

{

#region fields

privateconststring ConfigurationFileName = "Williablog.Core.config";

///<summary>

/// default path to the config file that contains the settings we are using

///</summary>

privatestaticstring configurationFile;

///<summary>

/// Stores an instance of this class, to cut down on I/O: No need to keep re-loading that config file

///</summary>

///<remarks>Cannot use system.web.caching since agents will not have access to this by default, so use static member instead.</remarks>

To make this work, you will need to set the "Copy to Output Directory" property of your Core.config file to "Copy always"and add a reference to System.Configuration to each of your projects.

We shall take this a step further next time and expand on this technique to enable your Core project to automatically detect wether it is running on localhost, a development environment, QA, or production, and to return the appropriate connection strings and settings for that environment.